Conclusion

The Spanish Apartment passionately advocates for Erasmus and the world-altering perspective travel, mobility and intercultural dialogue can pass onto Europe’s ‘emerging-adult’ generation. By the close of the trilogy, those earlier idealistic intentions had become steadily more impracticable, hence the transatlantic turn, and the gaze westwards to the New World. Cédric Klapisch himself, usually so broadly optimistic about the internal logic of the European project, sensed a waning in the concept of an all-unifying Europeanness. The film has cemented Klapisch’s position as an auteur capable of making films at once popular and high-brow, inventive, bitter-sweet and above all sensitive to contemporary issues.